atbaker/wikitrivia repository overview

⁠Wikitrivia

Wikitrivia is a game where you fill in the blanks in sentences pulled from Wikipedia articles, trying to fool your friends with the most convincing answer.

Play it yourself at http://wikitrivia.atbaker.me/⁠. Or, learn about its origins in this presentation⁠.

Questions are generated from Wikipedia articles using a companion Python script, wikipedia-question-generator⁠.

Wikitrivia was created by Andrew T. Baker⁠ in December 2014. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 License⁠.

⁠How to play

To play Wikitrivia, you will need one computer in a place where everyone can see it (connected to a TV is ideal). Each player will then connect to the game with their smartphone.

Wikitrivia is still in alpha, but it is possible to play an entire game. You'll get the hang of how to play once you answer a couple questions.

⁠Known issues

Players must not let their phones go to sleep while playing. There is no easy way to rejoin a game that is in progress.

⁠Quickstart

Wikitrivia was built using Docker⁠, so I recommend using it to run Wikitrivia locally and in the cloud.

1. Install Docker and docker-compose⁠
2. Clone this repository and cd into it
3. Run docker-compose up -d to start the node and db services

You should then be able to access Wikitrivia locally (or at boot2docker ip, if you're on OS X or Windows).

To load question data into Wikitrivia, run docker-compose run node npm run-script load data/default.json. Replace data/default.json with a path to your own question data if you generated some from wikipedia-question-generator⁠.

After that you're ready to play! Your computer will need to be somewhat exposed to the world for other players to connect on their mobile devices. Tools like ngrok⁠ can help with that.

⁠Architecture

Wikitrivia is built using a conventional MEAN stack⁠. It relies heavily on websockets to keep the host and player browsers in sync.